


The Road to Ithaca

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 01, What If the Elevator Door Hadn't Closed?, birthday angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 18:52:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4149021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No... wait!" Some lesser instinct throws his arm forward, his hand catching the sensor just as she slips out of sight. Holding the elevator open, Will watches with a furrowed brow as Mac attempts to assure herself that he isn't disappearing downstairs, fumbling through her notepad with panicked fingers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Road to Ithaca

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> **A/N:** With much consideration, Emily and I decided that this would make for a good birthday gift for you. Although I felt bad and had to scream at you via email to make sure that you didn't mind that I was handing you angst on your special day. I hope you like it! Also my apologies for apparently being on a Homer kick recently? Everything comes down to the Greeks, for me. The title is a reference to _The Odyssey_ \-- Ithaca is Odysseus' home that he is fighting to get back to for the duration of the story.

“Just as I  
have come from afar, creating pain for many—  
men and women across the good green earth—  
so let his name be Odysseus…  
the Son of Pain, a name he’ll earn in full.”  
— _The Odyssey_

 

* * *

 

Hating MacKenzie — it seems so foreign; this morning he hated MacKenzie. Now he has no idea what he feels for her, some nebulous arrangement of emotions tangled up in love and distrust and hurt, always hurt. But not hatred.

He lets the elevator doors close on her.

“No!”

Some lesser instinct throws his arm forward, his hand catching the sensor just as she slips out of sight. Holding the elevator open, he watches with a furrowed brow as she attempts to assure that he won’t disappear, fumbling through her notepad with panicked fingers.

“Wait,” she murmurs, and he leans deliberately into the small gap between the landing and the elevator floor.

Wide-eyed, she turns the pad to face him.

_IT’S NOT._

He loses feeling in the fingers on the sensors in the door. Rationally, he realizes that he’s gaping at her. He wants to react, knows that he should react, but all that he’s able to do is cast his face into an expression of complete confusion. Swallowing hard, he watches her turn the page over, revealing what he already knows will be there: _BUT IT CAN BE._

“It was you?”

Numbly, he steps back out into the elevator lobby.

Biting her lip, Mac nods. “Yeah.”

“It… _was_ you.”

The words — the same as before, different affect — trip thoughtlessly off his tongue as his mind churns through this revelation. He wonders why he didn’t piece this together before, an hour ago, or two, when Mac floated back into his life with a whirlwind trailing in her wake. It’s that last part, probably. No one but her has ever been able to more effectively shake him from rational thought, where assuming the flesh and blood person would be more real than a goddamn _hallucination,_ or whatever the correct psychological term is for deluding yourself into thinking a stranger in a crowd is the woman you’ve spent the past three years hating yourself for pining over. And then, of course, the correct name for the phenomena of deluding yourself that she couldn’t _possibly_ be there, but apparently _was_ — but before this morning, he didn’t even know that Mac was stateside.

Shrugging, Mac folds her folio closed, hugging her arms around it again. “Yup.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

His mind immediately provides the answer to that, too: she knew that he saw her. Will knows that he should clarify, he should make it clear that he’s not an idiot, but his thoughts proceed forwards, wondering why Mac didn’t bring up her presence at Northwestern earlier.

Did she think this was some twisted in-joke?

Her eyes brimming again with tears ends his introspection. Behind him, the elevator doors close again with the chime and the slight humming he can hear confirms that it’s being called to another floor.

“How could you think I was a hallucination?” she asks, blinking rapidly. “Vertigo medicine, really? What was I — the ghost of girlfriends past?”

“It appears that my staff would agree with analogizing me with Scrooge,” he manages to get out, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket.

Mac rolls her eyes. “That’s not an answer. Jesus, how much Xanax are you on?”

Every molecule of his being fights against answering her; as much as he may not hate MacKenzie, as much as he might still love her as well, he refuses to cede any of his hard-wrought control to her. She holds domain over his heart, he can very well control his mouth. Not that it particularly _matters_ — guilt smoothes over her features, and for all her efforts in staring at his chest and blanking and sheer determination, a few tears escape the corners of her eyes.

“I could ask you the same question,” he replies, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

For whatever reason, his blunt response earns him a small grin from her. But it’s sharp, and ironic, and when she tries to look at something that isn’t the lapel of his jacket more tears spill over onto her cheeks.

The sheen of a high dose anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants on her face is plain, and he’d recognize it anywhere. He recognized it earlier, he knows, when she was sitting across from his desk, her fingers clutching into the arms of her chair, her thigh, her wrist, before the sudden and loud swing into bravado and belligerence. Everything about Mac as she is now seems have been moved an inch to the left, just enough out of place to jar him.

Will is beginning to believe that this is a conversation that they shouldn’t be having in a hallway.

“I thought if you were back in the country, I’d have heard about it,” he gives as another attempt at an explanation.

She lets out a dry laugh, a noise he’s never heard from her before, clutching her folio even more tightly against her middle. “Yeah, I kept that secret locked up pretty tight.”

For a long moment, he just looks at her.

“What happened to you?”

He remembers Charlie’s words from earlier: _She’s exhausted. Not like at the end of a long day. Mentally and physically exhausted. She hasn’t had four hours sleep in two years. She’s been shot at in three different countries. And she’s been to way too many funerals for a girl her age. She wants to come home._ He remembers that he should hate MacKenzie, has spent every moment since she confessed to him about sleeping with Brian, every moment since she tried to convince him that it was _nothing_ , that it meant _nothing_ , every moment since she left him trying to hate her.

But he can’t hate her if she’s small, and trembling, and beginning to cry.

“I could ask you the same question,” she mumbles, before looking up at him. “Or was it all just… me?”

The easy answer is “yes,” but they’d both know it was a lie.

Or maybe they both wouldn’t.

Maybe there is some truth to it, but not nearly enough to make him want to say it to her now that she’s no longer the cold and calculating woman he’s spent the past three years constructing; this MacKenzie isn’t sculpted from gleaming marble, but from flesh and blood and tears and from thousands of miles across the ocean, from a fragile pocket of the world, from violence.

Will thinks he might understand, despite himself.

“You already got to yell at me earlier this afternoon.” He sighs, trying very hard to not reach out and touch her. “What happened to you?”

Her breathing evens out, and then begins to quicken before her shoulders start to shake and slowly, she collapses inwards. Cursing, he pulls his hands from his pockets. Going back to his office through the newsroom isn’t an option, and neither is taking an elevator down to the building’s main lobby. He catches his hand against the small of her back, leading her into the stairwell at the end of the hall.

It’s far from private, but it only connects to the service elevators and the lobbies of the other floors, and at this time of the day rarely sees use, and as soon as he shuts the door behind them Mac’s eyes dart to all the exits in the small, clinically cinderblock space as she tries to force her breathing to even.

And then just starts rambling.

“They don’t let you stay in a combat zone with a PTSD diagnosis. They also apparently don’t let you do much of anything else,” she tells his shoes, making up for having to hold her folio with one hand by gesturing wildly with the other. “Well, that and I started going right from my CNN-mandated therapy appointments to the bar across the street every Monday morning, and then after they fired me I started going pretty much _every morning_ and—”

This is not what he expected.

“Mac?”

Grimacing, she must realize how she sounds, waving a hand in front of her face as if batting away a pesky thought. “I’m not — I filled my prescriptions for all the — I’m really overmedicated right now,” she says haltingly. “To tell you the truth, but I’m not drunk.”

Will almost laughs. “I can tell,” he says instead, but he isn’t sure if that matters. It certainly isn’t why he interrupted her. “That wasn’t what — you have PTSD?” he asks, feeling himself lean in towards her.

All this time, he thinks he was hoping that Mac would succeed as an embed. And all this time, he thought she has been, accepting awards via phone call and livestream, building a pedestal of accolades for herself. It made it easier for him to resent her, easier for him to silently give over to surrender, blame his failures on her.

He never wanted _this._

“Ran into some trouble in Islamabad six months ago.” Mac explains, voice quiet and stilted, and then shivers, shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it. Swallowing in a slow and deliberate way, she bites her lip, and sets her folio down on the steps leading up to the next floor. “Got stabbed, while I was um, while Jim and I were covering a Shiite protest,” she explains, equally slowly. “There was a saboteur, an agitator who was trying to turn it into a riot. I got too close to him, one of the MPs threw tear gas into the crowd. I don’t remember much more than that.”

She worries her bottom lip between her teeth, and he’s worried she’ll draw blood. Under the fluorescent lights in the stairwell, she pales noticeably.

“You don’t have to tell me what happened,” Will says, trying to sound reassuring. But to his ears, he only sounds unsure.

Mac was stabbed. Mac was almost killed. Mac was almost _murdered._

He can feel his heart plunking down into his stomach.

“You can fire me now, if you want,” Mac says, shrugging into a well-worn expression of fake calm. But like the rest of her emotions today, it doesn’t quite land, and he _knows_ that it’s fake regardless even before a self-deprecating smiles tugs at the corners of her mouth. “Just um, keep Jim on? He’s a good kid. He’s the one who got me out, I can’t have dragged him into another shitty situation.”

“Jim is—”

 _Fine,_ he wants to say. _The one who was with you, while you were filing stories from caves and attending too many funerals. And stabbed, apparently._

“Scooter.”

“No, I remember his — fair point.” They both laugh at that, for just a moment. And then unable to force his concerns out of his mind, he opens and closes his mouth around a few aborted sentences before saying, “I just meant that, I’m glad you have someone. That you haven’t been alone. But you’re… okay? Everything healed?”

He gestures lamely at her abdomen, questions about where she was stabbed exactly and how bad it was and how long it took her in recovery loudly banging around inside his head. But he won’t ask them. Half because he doesn’t want to feel more sorry for her than he already does, and half because he doesn’t want her to feel obligated to tell him, to have to say it out loud the ostensible _one more time._

There are things he doesn’t like to talk about, too.

“They stitched me back up in Landstuhl, CNN pulled us back to DC. But I failed the psych evaluation and it cost too much to insure me to go back.”

He’s unwillingly angry on her behalf, too close to being grateful that Charlie was the one who found her, wherever he found her. “They wouldn’t give you an EP position because you’re experiencing post-traumatic stress for a story that you covered for their network, after winning them a _Peabody_ last year?”

She does bark a laugh, then.

“No. No, when you’re day-drinking in sweatpants and refusing to talk to your psychiatrist people tend to not hire you for things.” Exhaling raggedly, she lowers herself down onto a step, pushing her hair back through her fingers. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this — there must be a car waiting downstairs for you, you just want to be rid of me and go home.”

“The car can wait,” he answers shortly “I pay the service to wait.”

Sniffling, Mac nods, her eyes anywhere but on him. “Right.”

There’s a brief thrill that floods through him when he remembers how much money he’s making now compared to when she left, but it’s tempered by the sight of tears welling in her eyes again. Tamping down on displeased noise coming from somewhere deep in his chest, he kicks at the concrete base of the railing in front of him, pressing the toe of his loafer into it until it hurts. _Fuck,_ he thinks.

_Fuck fuck fuck._

“Why did you lie to me just now?” he asks, forcing himself to disregard the other complexities of this situation, ignore all the good reasons that Mac has to lie to him, ignore that she’s done it several times in the past. “When I asked if you were exhausted, you deflected.”

She doesn’t answer.

“Mac?”

“The same reason I lied to you five years ago when you asked if I was single,” she answers softly, voice barely audible at all, but even. The lines of her throat distend, and she rolls her head to the side — there’s nothing he can do except watch her face crumple into sorrow.  

Nothing he can do, until he forces himself to sit next to her, crowd himself into her space as she buries her head in her hands. This _isn’t_ what he wanted. He didn’t want her broken, or devastated, or shattered. He never wanted her to be like him. He just wanted her to become something other than a woman he could love. He wanted her to become someone he could get over.

Someone he could forget, or failing that, someone he could only hate.

Hesitantly, wraps an arm around her shoulder, pulling her head to rest on his shoulder.

“If I had known you didn’t give him your approval to hire me, if I didn’t think you had seen me at Northwestern — I never would have taken the job,” she cries, folding into herself when a sob bubbles up from her chest. “I’ve lost _everything._ And it feels like it’s all my fault. I lost my home, my friends, my job, my _mind._ I’ve pushed away _everyone_ who’s ever cared about me. My family — I haven’t spoken to my father since November. I don’t know how he is, I didn’t make home for Christmas. I have Jim. That’s it. I have Jim, but after everything I’ve put him through… And then, when Charlie came to me and offered me the position, I thought — I thought maybe, somehow, I hadn’t entirely lost you.”

Her hair is soft. Shorter than it used to be by five or six inches, but soft. It might smell the same, too, some nondescript floral scent he never bothered figuring out. Lavender, maybe, mixed with something else.

He says nothing, just stroking his fingers through her hair. He doesn’t know _what_ to say — he never had a chance, but Mac has had plenty. But she never deserved _this,_ either, to be taken and made to feel this way. But he’s reminded of how much pain stands in the way of the comfort of her hair threaded in-between his fingers, that this little intimacy is something that they can’t just _have._

Looking up at the ceiling, he takes an edifying breath.

“Mac — MacKenzie. You haven’t lost everything.”

“I just wanted to come home,” she says, voice breaking. Wiping her eyes, she lifts her head off his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I know I ruined everything. I have ruined _everything_ good in my life. I’ve been trying to tell you I’m sorry for three years. If I hadn’t been so _stupid_ —” She breaks down crying again, surprised with herself. “I’m sorry,” she fights to say, managing to still look him in the eye. “I thought it was what I was supposed to do.”

Her lips form into what he thinks might be an attempt at a smile, but the pitiful attempt only plucks at a pain that has long inhabited his chest.

“I wish you hadn’t told me.” Licking his lips, he shakes his head. “I just — why did you have to tell me?”

Blinking furiously, she sends more tears running down her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I fell in love you, and I thought it was what I was supposed to do.”

She fights back another sob, and then apologizes once more. This time for crying, he thinks, and she reaches for her things, and it’s not until he realizes that she’s trying to fit blistered heels back into her Louboutins that she’s going to bolt.

Someone needs to take care of her, and he doesn’t think that she’s going to let anyone else do it, let alone do it herself.

_Fuck._

Will catches her wrist, forcing her to look at him which only starts her bawling again. Sighing, he drops his arm over her shoulder again, pulls her in tightly. From this angle he can’t see much of her face at all — the curve of a cheek, the slope of her nose, her trembling mouth — and so focuses on the white cinderblock wall instead.

It’s not in him to hate her.

For so long, he’s had to believe that forgiveness was deserved. And maybe it still is. But he can’t bear to see her like this, knowing that if he lets her go, if he lets her leave now, she’ll continue letting whatever keen sense of self-destruction she’s honed over the past three years hollow her inside out until there’s nothing left to her at all.

Maybe Mac will prove to him that she deserves forgiveness.

But he thinks that she might need it, too.

He’s not well-practiced in mercy, but all his softest edges have always been reserved for her.  

“Stay,” he says, low and steady, even as his heart pounds. “Mac, if what you need is forgiveness, I can give that to you. You’re forgiven. You can stay, you can have the job, not worry about every coming Friday. You can stay.”

She cries harder, heaving hiccupping sobs into his neck. He wonders when was the last time MacKenzie let herself cry, and rubs circles into her back.

“Besides,” he continues in the same steady voice, not feeling steady at all but rather lightheaded and afraid, “you’re the only one around here with any sort of credentials to call themselves a journalist. If I’m going to do actual news, I’m going to need you.”

The only sound she can make in reply is a relieved whimper, curling her fingers into his sweater.

Will doesn’t know if he feels better or worse

Holding MacKenzie closer, he presses his lips to her forehead.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
